Heroku | Pricing

For hacking - this is too nice. A full Ruby on Rails environment, with hosting, and ssl, and domain masking, all for FREE. Heroku is a cloud-like scalabale Ruby offering, and this level is worth a try.

Heroku | Pricing

VIDEO: Suicide Micro Air Vehicles - Flight International

Truth is certainly stranger than fiction... this is a video about the near-future Air-Force Unmanned Flying Vehicles, which look alot like birds, can fly through hallways, and get recharged by landing on a power line.

VIDEO: Suicide Micro Air Vehicles - Flight International: "Watch this video, care of the Chicago Tribune newspaper�website, about the US Air Force Research Laboratory's computer generated vision of bird and insect-like Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) of the future including a suicide MAV that explodes on making contact with its human target"

Find movies, TV shows matching your taste watch online - Jinni

Just came across jinni which is a Pandora-like site for movies. Supposedly, you can just put in a plot you like, and it shows you movies that match that plot (like " sci-fi movies that save the world"). It's not perfect though, and you have to make sure you get genres and plots exactly like they are categorized. For example, my first two searches, "awesome action movies" and "boobs" both returned no results. Damn, and here I was thinking it would read my mind.

Find movies, TV shows matching your taste watch online - Jinni

Hip Hop Schools Silicon Valley

All good advice here...

Hip Hop Schools Silicon Valley: "-4- Be Happy Working It.�� Chamillionaire, drove 200 miles to sell 200 CDs… on consignment.� They don’t pay you to rap. They pay you to promote."

3 Free Ways to Geolocate By IP

For future reference...

3 Free Ways to Geolocate By IP

What is the minimum viable product? - Venture Hacks

This is a fantastic article/interview... It's exactly what I think about the viability of products you dream up. Several "tests" are also suggested, such as a quick AdWords campaign. It's chock full of wisdom.

What is the minimum viable product? - Venture Hacks: "Again, you’ve got to remember that 99% of the time nobody wants it. Most offers that appear to an entrepreneur as a good idea are actually horrible, horrible ideas. By making the offer and having it be rejected by customers, we learn not to waste time building stuff that nobody wants.

Nivi: Right. Maybe the right definition of a minimum viable product, like you were saying, is, essentially a test to see whether people will actually want the product that you’re imagining in your head."

Slashdot | Android Scans DVD Bar Codes, Downloads Movies

Too cool - 

Slashdot | Android Scans DVD Bar Codes, Downloads Movies: "A new Android application called BarTor (formerly ScanTorrent) can scan any DVD bar code and then signals either uTorrent or Vuze on your PC to download the movie from BitTorrent. How long do you think this will last?'"

BankerMLS.com | Welcome

Worth a look if you live in Birmingham :)

BankerMLS.com | Welcome

Britain seeing decline in rude names - UPI.com

Britain seeing decline in rude names - UPI.com: "By comparing the population of 2008 with Britain's initial census in 1881, Webber found the number of people named Daft has decreased by more than 50 percent. Individuals laden with the name Balls have also fallen by more than half, while the number of people named Cock in Britain has decreased by 75 percent."

Rohdesign | Mike Rohde, Designer : SXSW Interactive 2009 Sketchnotes

This is too cool...

Rohdesign | Mike Rohde, Designer : SXSW Interactive 2009 Sketchnotes: "SXSW Interactive 2009 Sketchnotes are Posted!
I've just finished processing and posting 70 pages of sketchnotes from SXSW Interactive 2009 on Flickr.
This year I doubled the amount of pages I was able to capture to 70, up from 34 pages of sketchnotes in 2008. Having done more sketchnotes since last year helped as did my position of official SXSWi sketchnoter."

The Open Company - Running your business as if it were an Open Source Project.

Being the Change � Blog Archive � The Open Company - Running your business as if it were an Open Source Project.: "“Totally open. No concept of bosses or employees. Anyone could join in at any time, doing whatever task they found interesting, for whatever time they found appropriate.”"

Should An iPhone App Developer Charge Or Run Ads? (Galaxy Impact Case Study)

Should An iPhone App Developer Charge Or Run Ads? (Galaxy Impact Case Study): "Conclusion

In the case of Galaxy Impact, we have done absolutely no marketing and did 2 updates with new features.

1. Free downloads vs for fee downloads ($.99) is 400:1
2. New downloads vs updates is about 3:1
3. If you decide to go with ad support, do it from the very beginning.
4. Updating does not help much
5. Ad revenue in the long run is higher than sales revenue
6. It’s hardly a sustainable business for most common app developers (with average apps)."

FACEBOOK COULD KILL GOOGLE -- Analyst (GOOG)

I disagree with the premise of the article, but it's an interesting read nonetheless. I did have an epiphany of sorts on Facebook recently (during my birthday, when a bunch of people I never hear from wished me a happy one). Here is the epiphany - 

For people like me, Facebook is useful and "neat" as a way to find old schoolmates and others from your past that you lost touch with, and immediately get a little caught up before ever trading some emails.  The Birthdays were an extra bonus I ignored.. until now. Losing touch with people from the past is just a fact of life right? 

Then it occured to me, for all the current high school and college students out there, they never have to lose touch with current friends, that will later become old friends. Even if someone moves to another continent, their life, and a communication channel into it, is only as far away as the internet. As they get older, they will know when people get engaged, get married, have kids, get divorced, change jobs, feel sad, need support, need to celebrate, have a mid life crisis, have grandchildren, grow old, get sick, etc, etc and know it as it happens. There will be no more losing touch in the new world that Facebook is. Things taken for granted as "that's life" to people of my generation will be unknown to the new one.

That's big. Real big. Not a doubt in my mind people will form businessess and social service groups in ways none of us can currently imagine right now. 

FACEBOOK COULD KILL GOOGLE -- Analyst (GOOG): "Complementary (For Now): Google and Facebook are two of the fastest growing and largest companies on the internet, and thus far, Facebook's ascendancy has likely helped Google gain share. 45% of monthly unique users go directly to Facebook (as a starting page), up from 39% a year ago. At the same time, Google is now driving 64% of Facebook's uniques, up from 51% a year ago. Google.com, on the other hand, has a consistent 66% of its uniques as a starting page, same as a year ago. Google's uniques via Facebook are growing at 188% y/y, and� now represent 19% of Google's traffic (up from 9% 12-months ago)."